It’s Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement – blogs.hbr.org (blog)

See on Scoop.itlean manufacturing

Who else is shocked by a phrase like “Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean, and other variations on continuous improvement…”?

Since when is Lean a variation on continuous improvement? Instead, continuous improvement is a component of Lean, which includes many features that are not continuous improvement.

Kaizen does not belong in a list in parallel with Lean. It literally means “improvement” and is used in Japan to mean continuous improvement. In other words, this entry in the list refers to the list itself.

Six Sigma is a method developed at Motorola in the US to solve process capability issues and is not continuous improvement.

Is it one more list patterned after Borges’s classification of animals?

See on blogs.hbr.org